Simon Hendery: Customer culture shock up in the boardroom

From the funky pre-start musak through to the full line-up of top execs and the 49-slide PowerPoint show, last Friday's result presentation in the eighth-floor boardroom of Telecom House in Wellington was a model of slick public relations.

And like all good PR jobs, this one came with a line of spin: forget the bottom-line loss of $435 million we've just reported, let's talk about the future.

That approach is to be expected: chief executive Theresa Gattung, who has a marketing background, signalled back in May that result time would be when the company would outline its post-unbundling strategy.

A sensible strategy, given that back then she would have known the sting of another huge AAPT write-down would need some dulling.

Fine, but even the best gloss Telecom could put on its future last week left it looking pretty feeble.

The company is waiting for a Government re-write of the rule book for its industry, and faces continuing steep erosion of its core calling revenue base and a rapidly changing technology landscape.

The best it could manage on Friday was a guesstimate that its earnings would remain flat until 2010.

Telecom keeps insisting it "gets it" - that it is adapting to the Government's shifting goalposts. The question is how far down the field the company is starting from.

The head of its consumer business, Kevin Kenrick, made an enlightening comment at the presentation.

"The thing that has become increasingly obvious to us is that the way that we are driving the business and what we need to do is around what we do to meet the needs of our customers," he said.

"We're seeing fundamental changes in network technology but we're also seeing fundamental changes in terms of what customers are expecting from us and from our industry."

Is the corporate arrogance that monopoly Telecom has exuded in the past so entrenched in its culture that it is only today waking up to the realisation that what customers want is important? Sadly, I think it is.

The temptation was to cry out: "Well, duh!" as Kenrick continued: "First and foremost we need to focus on the service experience we deliver to customers every day."

He then proffered an example of how this revolutionary change in attitude would be put into practice.

"The area [where] we are putting most focus is around the broadband helpdesk. Increasingly when you look at calls that come into our organisation, the vast bulk of those are now related to broadband and we need to beef up our ability to meet the needs of customers in a more complex area."

If my experience of the broadband helpdesk is any indication, this is certainly an area of the business that needs a service-focused rocket up it.

Telecom is spending up large promoting wireless broadband routers - a sensible leveraged focus as they push the benefits and convenience of broadband in the home.

But when mine arrived I couldn't get it to work. The first call to the helpdesk resulted in a 90-minute wait on hold. It, and the following three calls ended with the same outcome: a semi-capable call centre staffer tinkering with my basic Windows settings and then making a typically Telecom-arrogant declaration: There was a hardware issue with my laptop. I should call the computer manufacturer. Goodbye.

Having used the laptop on WiFi networks here and overseas, I knew there was nothing wrong with the hardware.

It wasn't until helpdesk call number five that I finally encountered a staff member who could help, someone who actually knew something about computers and figured out it was a modem setting issue, not a Windows issue.

Finally, after a month of frustration, the connection was working. In a state of stunned euphoria, I asked to speak to her supervisor so I could pass on my praise for her ability to solve a simple problem that had stumped four co-workers.

The supervisor's response: Yes, she's great, but more importantly your experience has given us a lesson we'll be able to share with the others.

Sadly that suggests a spirit that is rife throughout the corporation. In defiance of traditional sociological thinking, within Telecom the collective might seems to be less than the sum of its parts, not greater.

A new acronym is the last thing the telecommunications industry needs but at the PR event we were given one anyway: NGT - Next Generation Telecom. Let's hope the culture really is changing and that the company can accelerate up the field towards those shifted goalposts.